eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

November 2011

11/23/2011

Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down has done us all who depend on the Internet and know little about it a service here. Worm brings you into a place where there be dragons still – and knights valiantly trying to slay them. What becomes clear is that it is much easier to create havoc in the world than to prevent it. The Conficker worm opens a door into a computer, locks that door to prevent other intruders, and then starts to set up shop. It spreads and in a few days, begins to send out signals that it is ready to take orders from its “botmaster” – yeah – that’s what they call them. Over time, it assembles an army of “zombies” – computers that could be given a command to do some nefarious thing – like say ALL send requests to the same dating sight (or worse). In short, if all the computers that owe it allegiance were to “attack a single sight, it could bring it down. In a better world, the ubernerds that Bowden highlights in his book would have brought it down and found the genius-lunatic that created it. But … thus far, they haven’t.

Facinating read. And plenty of education to boot. One is reinded of just how little they know about something they depend on so much.

Feel free to read the Wikipedia report on the worm HERE but prepare to have your eyes glaze over.

“He tries hard. He speaks in clipped phrases, ratcheting down his natural mental velocity. But still the sentences come fast. Crisp. To the point. You can hear him straining to avoid the tricky territory of broader context, but then, failing, inevitably, as his unstoppable enthusiasm for the subject matter slips out of low gear and he’s off at turbo speed into Wired World: . . . bringing down the IRC server . . . the current UTC date . . . exploiting the buffer’s capacity . . . utilizing the peerto- peer mechanism . . . Suffice it to say, Phil is a man who has come face-to-face many times with the Glaze, the unmistakable look of profound confusion and uninterest that descends whenever a conversation turns to the inner workings of a computer.

The Glaze is familiar to every geek ever called upon to repair a malfunctioning machine—Look, dude, spare me the details, just fix it! Most people, even well-educated people with formidable language skills, folks with more than a passing knowledge of word-processing software and spreadsheets and dynamic graphical displays, people who spend hours every day with their fingertips on keyboards, whose livelihoods and even leisuretime preferences increasingly depend on fluency with a variety of software, remain utterly clueless about how any of it works. The innards of mainframes and operating systems and networks are considered not just unfathomable but somehow unknowable, or even not worth knowing, in the way that many people are content to regard electricity as voodoo. The technical side of the modern world took a sharp turn with the discovery of electricity, and then accelerated off the ramp with electromagnetism into the Realm of the Hopelessly Obtuse, so that everyday life has come to coexist in strict parallel with a mysterious techno dimension.” – From Worm: The First Digital World War